I have been at this for so long that no one short of John Skeet can tell me to RTFM.

I am trying to install VLC as per this answer and these instructions, but that installation requires several (read 'dozens') of modules, one of which in turn requires libfaac-dev. Installing that should be relatively painless:

sudo apt-get install libfaac-dev

However, I get the following error

E: Unable to locate package libfaac-dev

Which, turns out is due to the libfaac-dev package being technically not free so it is in the 'multiverse' respositories. So all you have to do is edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add a few repository addresses. But 'multiverse' is for Ubuntu, and Raspi runs on Debian 7.0 ("wheezy") so it uses a different system altogether (see here).

At this point I had so many tabs open, and I was trying to install so many dependencies of dependencies that I hit a wall, so my questions are:

4 Answers
4

The answer by Pouetnearly did it for me, but the following list took it all the way:

Edit your apt-get source list by adding another source.
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Paste in deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org/ wheezy main non-free on a new line. Save and exit.

sudo apt-get install debian-keyring

Next, we would perform sudo apt-get update, but it will complain that the public key for the new source is missing. You should probably go ahead and try it before continuing, because I would strongly recommend against blindly installing keys that you don't know what they are just because som random guy (me) told you so. apt-get will complain about key 07DC563D1F41B907 (which has fingerprint 1F41B907) is unknown.

The actions 4 and 5 need to be properly run as root (sudo bash, and then executing them), simply prepending every command with sudo did not do it for me.